Living in a world without cookies

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Good morning, Marketers, and won’t a cookieless world seem strange?

I had that thought last week when my Instagram feed suddenly filled with ads for a product I was not remotely in-market for. But at least I knew why. I had been researching a brand for a case study I was writing. I spent some time, of course, on their website, looking at products for which I was not the target demographic.

I filled no forms on the website, offered up no personal information, yet the ads showed up right away on my social media. Ah, the magic of cookies. I’m too accustomed to this happening to find it annoying, but it did make me think about how random advertising might become in the post-cookie age.

There is at least a chance I might be interested in a product I appear to have been researching. An internet where I’m shown ads for products I haven’t even looked at — snow shoes? helicopters? — is going to be stranger than we yet fully realize.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

P.S. On a more somber note, we mark with great regret the untimely passing of Vasil Azarov, founder of Growth Blazers and event marketer extraordinary. He was a good friend of MarTech and we send our heartfelt condolences to his family.

Shorts 

What we’re reading. Challenging thoughts from marketing strategist Kathleen Schaub. She argues that marketing is a brand’s “long game.” Short-term stimuli to trigger sales, she writes, should be “used infrequently and under appropriate conditions.” She may well be right, but with marketing organizations under pressure to show swift ROI, is playing the long game a luxury?

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.